Jon Sweeney Lecture and Book Signing

Phyllis Tickle died at 81 in September 2015. Before her death, she named Jon M. Sweeney her official biographer. Sweeney is coming to Atlanta to give a lecture on the life and career of this extraordinary woman. He will discuss her written work over fifty years (poetry, plays, literary, spiritual, and historical/theological), her marriage and family, and life on the Farm in Lucy, the subject of much of her oeuvre. Then there's Tickle’s work as an academic and book publisher in Tennessee, her impact as the founding editor in religion at Publishers Weekly during the boom of spiritual writing and interfaith understanding in the 1990s; relationships with Gwendolyn Brooks, John Shelby Spong, Marcus Borg, Brian McLaren, and Desmond Tutu; and the impact she had on the communities where all of her writing, scholarship, and advocacy has seen the greatest impact: the hundreds of thousands who took on fixed-hour prayer due to her The Divine Hours series; the Episcopal Church USA writ large; LGBTQ Christians awaiting full acceptance; and Emergence Christianity, for which she served as historian, forecaster, and champion.

This lecture is made possible by the generous support of our Book Fellows program.